RISE with SAP was announced in early 2021, and many SAP users have been itching to put it through its paces. Described as a holistic Business-Transformation-as-a-Service (BTaaS), RISE with SAP is more than any Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service solution. It seeks to give businesses the support they need to reach true digital transformation. Even though RISE with SAP is big news, almost no one is really aware of what it does and what they need to know before introducing it. As the new year rolls around and RISE with SAP becomes more available, here are a few tips to help you implement it in your business deployment.
1. Cost
The price of digital transformation can be enormous for some businesses. However, what exacerbates that issue is when there’s no plan or guideline to make that transformation happen. Companies are most concerned about managing costs while still providing viable options for their business transformation. RISE with SAP is a complete suite of tools dedicated to helping a business plan and execute its digital transformation. The skill of balancing cost with the need for digital transformation can be mitigated by introducing RISE with SAP as a complete one-stop shop for the process.
2. Security
Moving from an on-premise solution to a cloud-based solution has many considerations, the chief of which is maintaining data integrity and security. During digital transformation, the cloud provider takes up some of the responsibility for the data security, but the business retains some security elements. Knowing where the duties (and the liabilities concerned with them) start and end is crucial to success. SAP has created the secure operations map (SOM) to help businesses see security from a holistic perspective and better grasp what’s going on.
3. Partners
Choosing a provider for your RISE with SAP implementation takes a lot of consideration. The business must trust its provider and should liaise with them efficiently. RISE with SAP isn’t hosted on an on-premise system but needs to run off the provider’s infrastructure. This results in the business needing specialized configuration to access data from RISE with SAP in other cloud-based applications. Support in a mixed vendor landscape needs to be considered carefully before choosing the company the business intends to partner with for its cloud hosting solution.
4. Contracts
On-Premise SAP systems used to be tied down with contracts related to governance, structure, and service-level agreements (SLAs). RISE with SAP simplifies things significantly. The business only needs to worry about arranging implementation and management services with the provider. SAP handles all the other details itself. The result is a more simplified environment and fewer SLAs to bog down the system. While this has simplified the contract process, the licenses for SAP S/4HANA have become more complicated to compensate. Thus, license analysis can help a business manage its costs and reduce the overhead from unwanted licensing.
5. SAP S/4HANA
Many companies are still holding off on digital transformation. An estimated 25% of the existing SAP customers have taken the plunge to SAP S/4HANA, but as many as three-quarters of users are still holding on to their on-premise systems. This isn’t just because these companies are afraid of change. S/4HANA requires a partner skilled in the deployment and management of cloud systems and understands compliance and security. Businesses are running out of time, however, as 2027 rapidly approaches. They need to move their data onto the cloud before support for on-premise systems ends.
